22 Jan 2016 Corbis Sold

Recent restructuring and layoffs at Corbis appear to have been, as many suspected, related to the sale of the business as the company today made it official, settling months of speculation and rumours.

Getty Buys Corbis, Kinda.

The assets of the Corbis stock licensing businesses have been sold to Unity Glory International Ltd, a company owned by Visual China Group’s major shareholders. Unity Glory will own and manage Corbis Image, Corbis Motion and Veer brands, archives and associated trademarks.

Visual China Group is the exclusive distributor of Getty Images in China, and the two companies have been working closely together for over 10 years.

Now they’ve also closed a deal for Getty to be the exclusive distributor of Corbis content outside China.  The content will become Corbis-branded collections on Getty.

Corbis Entertainment to be Rebranded

Corbis entered entertainment advertising in May 2014 via their Brand Entertainment Network (BEN) for product placement in mainstream TV shows and films, later adding celebrity rights representation and rights clearance service Greenlight, and celebrity content specialised service Splash.  These businesses were recently collected under the umbrella brand ‘Corbis Entertainment’.

Following the sale of their stock imagery division, the company will continue operations with Corbis Entertainment, which will soon be rebranded.

More Details

Visual China Group are also investors and partners with 500px, who must be more than a little nervous about the implications of this.

The Shutterstock share price started the day up around 2%, but it seems investors have finally figured out the connection with this news, and now it’s slightly down (SSTK -1.47% at time of writing).

PhotoArchiveNews has a solid roundup of the situation if you’re interested in more details.